Teresa Fannin, reader, writer

Tag Archives: Bob Hope

Radio. No, 1930-1950’s radio. Old Time Radio, well they call it Radio Classics, hosted by the nicest person, Greg Bell, who responds wonderfully quickly to email. As I said, nice man.

What does this have to do with structure? Tom and I travel a lot in our car. It’s easier to car ride to Baltimore than to fly. Fly, ha! it’s an hour south to the airport, be there two hours early, go through TSA, wait, board, wait, fly, deplane, wait or pick up car. And by the time you are done, you have saved maybe an hour or two and you are frazzled, have spent more money than you planned and, well, yuck! So back to travel. We listen to XM radio or Sirrus, whichever, now they are one. While it’s interesting to keep up on the news, sometimes that overwhelms you, you can only hear about one story told four different ways for so long.

On Radio Classics they have Bob Hope, Jack Benny for laughs–not quite vaudeville, not quite tv either. Then you have the shows! Richard Diamond, Johnny Dollar And The Action Packed Expense Report. Not to mention, the Shadow and the Dimension X series. So, variety shows, detective stories, murder, fantasy, science fiction….all done in twenty minute blocks, THE WHOLE STORY. Radio Classics fascinates me because the stories have a beginning, middle and end…they are complete. Listening to one show back several years I could not get it out of my head. I’ve tried several ways to figure out how to write this story, because, well, I need it to be longer than twenty minutes and I want the hero to be a kid. Enter Greg Bell who not only sent me the mp3 recording of the show, but the transcript!

I’ve vacillated between a girl or a boy. It could be either. I finally chose a girl because the end of the story is one where I want a hard choice, not an easy one, and one where not everyone lives. And I’d like to see a girl make that choice. But the structure of the story has alway eluded me. How, just how do I get from introducing the characters to the end where the reader <hopefully> is sympathetic enough to the main character to see her ending as not sacrifice, but simply ‘the right thing to do’.

And last night, while researching how I was going to get the main characters from point A to point B so that the denouement is believable, I got it. I had, a while back, decided that to put them on a plane would be a quick way to get them where they need to go, but there was no way to have the story unfold. So I put them on a train. Last night I really started to research the trains. From California to Chicago is the California Zephyr. and then from Chicago to upstate New York is the Lake Shore Limited. And all the stops along the way. A little research of the stops and some interesting tidbits for the story line emerge.

So I got two things out of making this one decision to have the story revolve around a train ride. One I found the structure for the story, basically about four days, maybe more, but along a train route. Have not factored in train changing time, etc. yet, but that’s not a deal breaker. And two, I can add a dimension to my character by having her interested, engaged and sometimes overwhelmed by each of the stops as well as the story itself.